


Finding Asumu

by ncfan



Category: Umineko no Naku Koro ni | When the Seagulls Cry
Genre: Character Study, Essays, Meta, Other, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 06:55:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8655085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Ushiromiya Asumu is a character of some importance in Umineko no naku koro ni. She is the mother of one of the main characters; her untimely death precipitates a large chunk of the plot come 1986. And yet, we know relatively little about Asumu. For all that she is an important character, Asumu remains in the shadows, just beyond where she can be seen clearly. Asumu sometimes feels like one of the mysteries of Umineko, in which we are given information to parse and draw conclusions from, but never spoon-fed an answer. Except in this case, the story doesn’t place nearly as much emphasis on presenting Asumu to us as a mystery to solve. We are given considerably less details, considerably less evidence, than we are to solve the questions of “Who is Beatrice?” and “Who is the culprit?” And thus, inevitably, any answer we come to must be sparser, must deal more heavily in speculation.However, I do think that speculation, imprecise though it might be, can be valuable in the absence of many explicit points. Searching through negative space can yield valuable results, even if we can never know the truth for certain.





	1. Introduction

**Introduction**

Ushiromiya Asumu is a character of some importance in Umineko no naku koro ni. She is the mother of one of the main characters; her untimely death precipitates a large chunk of the plot come 1986. And yet, we know relatively little about Asumu. For all that she is an important character, Asumu remains in the shadows, just beyond where she can be seen clearly. Asumu sometimes feels like one of the mysteries of Umineko, in which we are given information to parse and draw conclusions from, but never spoon-fed an answer. Except in this case, the story doesn’t place nearly as much emphasis on presenting Asumu to us as a mystery to solve. We are given considerably less details, considerably less evidence, than we are to solve the questions of “Who is Beatrice?” and “Who is the culprit?” And thus, inevitably, any answer we come to must be sparser, must deal more heavily in speculation.

However, I do think that speculation, imprecise though it might be, can be valuable in the absence of many explicit points. Searching through negative space can yield valuable results, even if we can never know the truth for certain.

I was originally going to post this meta in one, or maybe two parts, but it soon got to be too long for that. Therefore, I’ve broken the meta up into five sections (Some admittedly longer than others). The first part will be posted today, and the latter four at a later date.

Finding Asumu:

  * Part 1: The Canon. Excerpts from the VNs (and, when they provide different information, the manga adaptation) that do or can pertain to Asumu.
  * Part 2: Relationships. Asumu’s relationships with others.
  * Part 3: Physical Appearance. Since we get little information on this in the VNs, I thought this worth talking about.
  * Part 4: Death. Speculation on Asumu’s death.
  * Part 5: Asumu the Woman. What was Asumu really like, as a person?




	2. Part 1: The Canon

Here we have excerpts from the VNs that do or can pertain to Asumu. There aren’t too many instances in which the manga adaptation expands upon this information, or alters the information in any way—just two that I could find. While I do consider adaptations to be ‘canon optional,’ in that while you _can_ take it as canon, you do not _have_ to take it as canon, given that Ryukishi did have some level of involvement in the manga, and given the general paucity of information on Asumu, I thought it prudent to include quotations from the manga where appropriate. One has the Yen Press translation; the other, not having been published in an English volume yet, has the translation posted to Mangareader.com.

 

 

\- This is Battler’s profile in the TIPs, referring to him as Asumu’s son and detailing that after Asumu died and Rudolf hastily married an already-pregnant Kyrie (though they don’t yet tell us that Kyrie was already pregnant when Asumu died), Battler left in a rage and went to live with Asumu’s parents.

 

 

\- An indication that Asumu was possibly _not_ capable of reining Rudolf in. Of course, given that Battler was aware that Kyrie was pregnant with Ange when Asumu died, that could be what he’s referring to, but it’s possible that he picked up on the fact that Rudolf had other affairs while Asumu was still alive, and that she was either incapable of getting him to stop, or didn’t even try.

 

 

\- Battler tells us directly that his mother died six years ago, and that Kyrie is his stepmother. His lack of rancor towards Kyrie, combined with the fact that we know that Rudolf had Kyrie over at his house even when he was married to Asumu suggests that Asumu never let on the ‘interesting’ relationship between the two women.

 

 

\- Battler indicating to us that Rudolf ‘betrayed’ Asumu in some way, and that’s why he went to live with his grandparents after his mother died, even using his mother’s maiden name. He doesn’t indicate what exactly that ‘betrayal’ was, but you can kind of guess.

 

 

\- Here we get information that Asumu’s family was less wealthy than the Ushiromiya family, and possibly somewhat poor.

 

 

\- A possible reference to Asumu getting angry with Rudolf from time to time, and him fearing her anger.

 

\--

 

 

\- Kyrie references the fact that Rudolf didn’t break things off with her after marrying Asumu.

 

\- Kyrie paints a picture for us of Rudolf and Kyrie in a committed relationship until Asumu the Evil Homewrecker came along, but EP6 will tell us something rather different…

 

\- This is the first we hear of Asumu and Kyrie being pregnant at the same time, and Kyrie having a miscarriage.

 

 

\- Exhibit A: Kyrie’s homicidal envy towards Asumu.

 

 

\- Kyrie is singularly bad at letting things go; Asumu casts a long shadow, still.

 

\--

 

 

\- This is the first time we get the information that Battler inherited his fear of moving vehicles from Asumu. Apparently, even Rudolf eventually found this an irritating trait of hers.

 

 

\- Kyrie makes like she’s going to start going off on Asumu, but Rudolf quickly cuts her off.

 

 

\- It seems that Battler used the fact that Asumu could not speak in her own defense as justification for his breach with Rudolf after he married Kyrie…

 

 

\- …And once Battler was no longer angry with his father, he did a complete 180, deciding that his mother wouldn’t have wanted them to fight. We also get the tidbit that Asumu was good at mediating arguments—or, at least, arguments between a child and an adult who sometimes acted like a child.

 

 

\- Battler’s sense of self is so strongly tied to being Asumu’s son that when he finds that he cannot say ‘It was from Ushiromiya Asumu that I was born,’ when he finds that he cannot say that he is Asumu’s biological child, he literally erases himself. He loses his sense of self. He even misses that his qualification to be Beatrice’s opponent is based on being Kinzo’s grandchild, not Asumu’s son.

 

 

\- Ange has this to say on Battler and Asumu’s bond. Knowing what she does, she could have just blown the whole thing wide open and told him that he was actually Kyrie’s biological child, but instead focused on the bond Battler shared with Asumu.

 

\--

 

 

\- It’s hard for me to guess if this is just one of those generic ‘Like Mom always says,’ or if Battler is actually talking about Asumu, but if the latter, it sounds like she taught him about the power of positive thinking.

 

\--

 

 

\- Apparently, Asumu was bothered by Battler’s popularity with girls because to her it was reminiscent of Rudolf’s womanizing. It seems she wasn’t comfortable with this side of her husband.

 

 

\- Apparently, Battler spoke to Ange about Asumu, and Kyrie had all photos of Asumu removed from her new house.

 

 

 

\- Rudolf’s womanizing M.O.

 

\- Kyrie got to the top of Rudolf’s group of followers, but she still wasn’t the only woman in his life, and this made her very jealous and insecure.

 

 

\- I find the fact that we never find out what ‘getting rid of the other women’ entailed a bit worrying.

 

 

\- Though I seriously doubt Kyrie intends it as a compliment, Kyrie’s opinion of Asumu is that she must have been pretty intelligent to fly under her radar for so long. Kyrie assumes that Asumu figured out how to stand out among the ‘flashy’ girls surrounding Rudolf, and who Rudolf had tired of.

 

 

\- Kyrie still regrets letting Asumu get close to Rudolf all these years later, instead of ‘getting rid’ of her like she had many other girls.

 

\- By Kyrie, this was Asumu’s M.O. in stealing Rudolf away from her.

 

\- We learn that a combination of poor eating habits and fears that this would threaten her position as Rudolf’s business partner caused Kyrie to keep her mouth shut about her pregnancy, or simply deny the truth to herself.

 

\- Kyrie only realized she was pregnant after Rudolf and Asumu married. She tried to split them up, but to no avail. We also get Kyrie’s belief that Asumu’s fear of moving vehicles was nothing but a put-on to get Rudolf’s attention.

 

 

\- Even Kyrie acknowledges that Rudolf coming to see her when she gave birth, even though his wife was in labor too, was not really what we would consider normally acceptable behavior. (Which to me might suggest that Asumu had already had her stillbirth by the time Rudolf came to see Kyrie.)

 

 

\- Interestingly, though, Ange doesn’t seem to feel any rancor towards Asumu herself.

 

 

\- But we know that that is not what happened when Asumu actually did have a stillbirth.

 

 

\- More insight into Kyrie’s homicidal envy towards Asumu. Also, I think the ‘on the eighteenth year’ bit is either a continuity gaffe or a translation error. When, in EP3, Kyrie says she’s had Rudolf stolen from her for eighteen years, the message seems to be that she’s counting the years after Asumu died, because she still feels like she’s fighting Asumu over Rudolf.

The manga gives us a little more insight into what Kyrie did in the course of trying to break up Rudolf and Asumu, showing us an incident in which she went to Asumu with news that she was pregnant:

_“But I couldn’t just give up on him. I told Asumu-san about my pregnancy, hoping to rattle her…”_

_“And what is your point? Please leave.”_

\--

 

 

\- Here we see that Asumu’s fear of moving vehicles persisted throughout her entire adult life.

 

 

\- More talk about Battler convincing his grandparents to help him after his mother died.

 

 

\- Natsuhi is no happier about Rudolf’s hasty remarriage than Battler was.

 

 

\- We’ve even got Rudolf acknowledging that not breaking things off with Kyrie after he married Asumu was inappropriate.

 

 

\- Here is Battler’s direct reaction to Rudolf’s remarriage. I do agree with Battler that the timing of Asumu’s death in conjunction with Kyrie’s pregnancy sure is… convenient. And it looks like Battler may have already had reservations about Rudolf even before Asumu’s death. Is this him ‘rewriting history’ in his head, or had he picked up on something off?

 

 

 

\- Rudolf is shown as feeling genuinely, horribly guilty after Asumu dies, to the point where he actually seems to feel indirectly responsible for her death (I also think this may be the only time Rudolf ever cries in the series).

 

 

\- And it’s not just me and Battler who consider the timing of Asumu’s death ‘quite the coincidence’, though Krauss will try to frame this as a positive thing, which… blech.

 

 

\- Eva can’t make somebody feel at ease without putting somebody else down, can she?

 

 

\- And we see that Asumu’s father is still furious about Rudolf remarrying so quickly (and to a woman he’d already gotten pregnant, too) a year later.

 

 

 

\- After we get to the Tea Party and Kyrie and Rudolf start killing everybody, we get this exchange. Kyrie expresses a willingness to kill Battler, ostensibly because she won’t risk the gold over him, but probably really for the crime of being Asumu’s child. And Rudolf makes a token protest, but it appears going against Kyrie is just too troublesome for him.

 

 

\- A possible hint about just how Kyrie ‘got rid of’ the girls who flocked around Rudolf when they got too troublesome for her liking.

 

\--

 

 

\- Given that EP8 likes to derail characters, I’m not sure we can take this entirely at face value, but let’s just go ahead and assume Kyrie’s telling the truth. This does at least give us an impression that she _tried_ to accept Battler. Even if it was for Rudolf’s (and maybe Ange’s) sake rather than Battler’s or Kyrie’s own, she did try. But she couldn’t; envy of a dead woman really does rule her, in the end.

 

 

\- EP8 spells out for us what many of us likely guessed after EP4; it was Asumu who had the stillbirth, not Kyrie, and Rudolf switched the babies around.

 

 

\- Rudolf’s rationale for stealing Kyrie’s baby and deceiving Kyrie and Asumu both.

 

 

\- First point: sounds like Rudolf was expecting Asumu to be a lot more forgiving of his serial infidelity than she actually was. Second point: this is pretty much the whopper for anyone who’s interested in Asumu. Rudolf thinks she might have figured out Battler wasn’t her biological child, but she still didn’t blow the whistle.

The manga expands on Rudolf’s rationale for the baby-switch a bit:

_“The cunning Kyrie would probably take advantage of this childbirth to separate me from Asumu and press me to enter her into the family register. Besides, there was also the precedent of Natsuhi-neesan, too. There’s no way that damn Dad wouldn’t suggest to make Kyrie, who gave birth to a boy, my legal wife. And… in that case… what will happen to Asumu? Kyrie is a good woman. She’s clever, and synchronizes well with me, too. She’s a partner, both in business and personal life. Asumu forgives my mistakes and accepts me, even when I’m such a pathetic person. I want to protect her. I don’t want to let go of those two.”_

We also get some more info from Ange, who overhears Rudolf’s confession in the manga:

_“In 1998, it was a well-known fact that Battler Onii-chan was a child of Dad and Mom. Suspicious of the Rokkenjima Incident conspiracy theories, the police and the media investigated the life of the relatives. The doctor in question revealed the switch of the babies.”_

Finally, in the manga, Rudolf’s wording regarding Asumu possibly figuring out about the switch is changed to “ _She looked composed and was unexpectedly sharp, so perhaps she noticed._ ” I can’t tell if by ‘sharp,’ Rudolf meant that Asumu was smarter than seemed, or if he meant that she had a sharp temper, sharp tongue, or something like that.


	3. Part 2: Relationships

**Relationships**

Though Asumu’s relationship with the Ushiromiya family is, for the most part, not particularly fleshed out, there are a few cases in which we can paint a picture of what her relationship with a certain person was like.

Her Parents

We know little about Asumu’s relationship with her parents, though this is not unusual. Of all the siblings’ spouses, the only one whose natal family we get any real insight into is Kyrie’s. What we do know about Asumu’s relationship with her parents suggests that it was a loving one. We know that Asumu’s father was furious on her behalf when Rudolf’s infidelity was exposed and he married a pregnant Kyrie so soon after his daughter’s death. Indeed, we are told that Asumu’s father was still furious a year after she died.

The fact that Asumu’s parents readily took Battler in, despite their being what Umineko calls a ‘commoner family’ (which may suggest some degree of poverty) also lends itself to the belief that Asumu had a good relationship with her family. That they were willing to support Battler when he himself was furious over Rudolf’s infidelity and perceived disrespect to Asumu’s memory suggests that they felt Asumu deserved better than this.

Kyrie

Kyrie’s attitude towards Asumu is one marked by animosity and envy, going back almost twenty years.

When asked, Kyrie states in EP6 that she knew Asumu for far longer than Rudolf knew about Asumu. It is unknown under what circumstances they met, that would have allowed Kyrie to have known Asumu long before Rudolf did. Given that they were only two of many women who hung around Rudolf at the time, it is possible that Asumu simply didn’t catch Rudolf’s attention at first. Kyrie claims that Asumu wasn’t even one of Rudolf’s followers at first, but “just one of his fans”; assuming that this can be taken at face value (and that’s not a small ‘assuming’), this might account for Kyrie’s having been aware of Asumu long before Rudolf was.

However it was, it is clear that of all the women who vied for Rudolf’s attentions, Kyrie and Asumu were the only real contenders for his lasting affection. Kyrie attempted to hold Rudolf’s attention by making herself indispensable to him as a business partner and financial aide. Asumu, on the other hand, got—and held—Rudolf’s attention with her gentleness and vulnerability. Kyrie grudgingly admits that Asumu was quite intelligent in how she went about things. Though the context (her talking to Jessica about how Asumu ‘stole’ Rudolf away from her) makes it clear that this was _not_ intended as a compliment, even Kyrie is willing to admit that Asumu was not an idiot.

In EP6, Ange tells us that Kyrie would sometimes ‘get rid of’ the women who hung around Rudolf. The method by which she did so has never been confirmed, though dialogue in the EP7 Tea Party suggests violence. It is said that Kyrie regrets not taking the opportunity to ‘get rid of’ Asumu before she and Rudolf became a couple. As Asumu and Rudolf grew closer, and Kyrie was pushed away (emotionally, though not physically, as Kyrie and Rudolf carried on with their sexual relationship), Kyrie developed a deep, murderous envy of Asumu, which would rule her for the rest of her life.

Kyrie often recalls praying for Asumu’s death. In fact, she spent years working up the nerve to kill Asumu herself, finally finding it in herself to buy a knife with which to do the deed, not long before Asumu actually died. Kyrie regards Asumu’s death in 1980 as a long-awaited miracle, claiming that her hatred had become a curse, which killed Asumu.

One would think that Asumu’s death and Kyrie’s marriage to Rudolf would have allowed her to be released from her envy, but we know that this was not the case. Kyrie removed every photo of Asumu from her new home after she moved in, and it seems entirely likely that she would have destroyed them had Battler not accepted them. During her battle with Leviathan in EP3, Kyrie claims that Asumu has stolen Rudolf from her for the last eighteen years—the twelve years in which Asumu and Rudolf were married, and the six years in which Asumu has been dead. Even six years after Asumu’s death, Kyrie still fosters a fierce hatred towards her, and will go off on rants about Asumu whenever prompted.

Kyrie’s envy and hatred are not restricted to Asumu alone, but spill over on to Asumu’s son, Battler, as well. Kyrie deeply resents Battler as being a living reminder of Asumu and Rudolf’s love for Asumu; one can only imagine her thoughts when she saw what havoc Asumu’s son could wreak in her new family, her thoughts when she saw that his relationship with Asumu’s son still meant so very much to _her_ husband. Further twisting the knife is that Asumu’s son lived, when Kyrie’s died—and while we discover the truth of _that_ matter in EP8, there’s a good chance that, in Rokkenjima Prime, Kyrie _never_ found out the truth.

Kyrie cannot bring herself to accept Battler. She admits in EP8 that she tried to be an adult about it and not hold being Asumu’s son against Battler, but even the rosiest of EPs admits to us that she just couldn’t do it. The most Kyrie can do is put on a good face and pretend to like Battler. In the EP7 Tea Party, Kyrie goes so far as to express herself willing to kill Battler for being Asumu’s son. She ostensibly claims to be more worried about Battler being unwilling to cooperate with her and Rudolf, but her line ‘It’s a real pain to be nice to Asumu-san’s kid’ and the note about Battler being the son of a woman she hates shows where her priorities really are.

The danger of taking anything Kyrie says about Asumu at face value is that Kyrie has a tendency to paint Asumu’s actions in the most negative light possible, and at times to outright misrepresent the situation between herself, Asumu and Rudolf. Kyrie asserts that Asumu’s fear of shaking vehicles was nothing more than an act, calculated to trigger Rudolf’s protective instincts, and to win his attention and sympathy. How seriously can we take that, when we hear it from someone who hates Asumu so much that she was willing to kill her? In EP3, Kyrie paints a scenario of her and Rudolf in a committed relationship until Asumu came along and got in between them, but we know from EP6 that, in reality, Kyrie and Asumu were only two of many women in Rudolf’s life at that time. Kyrie’s claim that Asumu “used her body as a weapon to seduce him, and then acted even more repulsively, and cornered Rudolf-san so that he was forced to [marry] her” by deliberately getting pregnant and putting him in a baby trap situation is undercut by Kyrie’s admission in the EP7 Tea Party that her daughter Ange’s value to her rests primarily on her ability to function as a chain to keep Rudolf tied to her.

There’s also the fact that Kyrie’s desperately needs to believe that there was never any real love between Rudolf and Asumu, or at least that Rudolf’s regard for her is greater than it ever was for Asumu. She talks about how Asumu ‘tricked’ Rudolf. During her fight with Leviathan, Kyrie smugly remarks that Rudolf has always come to her aid, even when Asumu was still around—though interestingly, he doesn’t come to her rescue during that fight, despite Kyrie’s confidence that he’ll “come for [her] on a white horse soon.” And Kyrie believes that Rudolf would have dropped Asumu like a hot coal and married her instead if Asumu had been the one who had a stillbirth, and Kyrie the living baby. In reality, we know that Rudolf did no such thing, but Kyrie couldn’t let herself believe that.

Curiously, in spite of all of this, Kyrie’s most common form of address for Asumu is ‘Asumu-san.’ Referring to Asumu by an honorific is a token of courtesy that seems rather… odd, coming from Kyrie, but there are some possible explanations for it. One, is that this is simply a reflection of Kyrie’s upbringing, and that she was raised to always address people by the proper honorifics, even the people she hates. Two, is that, depending on the context, referring to someone by their given name and no honorific can in Japanese denote disrespect or closeness, and Kyrie wanted to avoid the latter impression. Three, is that Kyrie just wants to maintain as much emotional distance between her and Asumu as possible. Calling Asumu by her maiden name would come off as more hostile than Kyrie wants to appear (This assumes that, under normal circumstances, she doesn’t want people to see how much control Asumu’s ghost has over her). Calling her ‘Ushiromiya’ is just another slow twist of the knife.

We don’t get a great deal of insight into the way Asumu felt about Kyrie. That seems inevitable, considering we get no direct, unfiltered insight into Asumu. However, the VNs present us with a couple of reports that can give us some clues.

Ange tells us that just after Rudolf and Asumu married, Kyrie tried to break them up on several occasions. The manga adaptation of EP6 is more explicit about what went in to Kyrie’s trying to break up the newlyweds, and recounts an incident in which Kyrie went to Rudolf and Asumu’s house, and told Asumu that she was pregnant. Asumu’s reaction, in both the VN and the manga, is basically to tell Kyrie to get off her lawn. More seriously, Asumu essentially tells Kyrie to go away and stop bothering them. Asumu seems to have valued her relationship with Rudolf over Kyrie’s feelings, and viewed Kyrie’s attempts at interference with irritation.

Battler, meanwhile, tells us that Kyrie was over at his house many times while his mother was alive. He and Kyrie developed (what Battler thought was) a good relationship, and Battler never recalls picking up on any animosity between Asumu and Kyrie. While we don’t know how Asumu felt about having Kyrie in her house, we do know that, for whatever reason (speculation of which will appear in a later installment), Asumu put on a good face and never let any hint of negative feelings slip in front of Battler.

My verdict, therefore, is that Asumu wasn’t nearly as affected by Kyrie as Kyrie was—and still is—by her.

Battler

Battler loves his mother deeply; indeed, he seems to have idolized her. Whenever he talks about Asumu, he never has anything negative to say about her.

For specifics, we know that Battler talked to Ange about Asumu sometimes (Presumably when Kyrie wasn’t in earshot, since I feel like she would have brought that up during her Asumu-related rants in EP3 and EP6, if she had known). While we do not know exactly what Battler told Ange about Asumu, we do know that he told her things to the effect that Asumu never made Battler feel lonely or unwanted. There’s also a quote of Battler’s from EP5, speaking to Dlanor: “Like Mom always used to say, ……if you think you can’t open it, then it really won’t open no matter how hard you try.” Assuming that this isn’t just some generic ‘Like Mom always says’ proverb, here we have Battler speaking fondly of a woman who taught him the power of positive thinking.

Furthermore, in EP4, George expresses the belief that Battler inherited his fear of shaking vehicles from Asumu. George reasons that Battler looked at something that frightened his mother and concluded that it was only reasonable that he be frightened of it too. If this is indeed how Battler picked up his fear of shaking vehicles, it speaks to Battler’s having looked to his mother for cues on how to react to situations growing up.

Asumu’s death was devastating for Battler, but something would happen soon after that seems to have devastated him even more. Battler was irate enough when, so soon after Asumu died, his father, Rudolf, married Sumadera Kyrie, his long-time business partner. But when it turned out that Kyrie had already been pregnant _before_ Asumu died? That was the last straw.

Interestingly, Battler very explicitly does not blame Kyrie or Ange for this. He continued to have (what he thinks is) a good relationship with Kyrie, even after finding out that Kyrie is the woman his father was cheating on his mother wish. Battler even goes so far as to say that his new sibling will need both of her parents, and that Rudolf should be a father to her. Instead, Battler places all the blame for this situation on Rudolf. It must have seemed to him that if Rudolf was ostensibly moving on with his life so soon after Asumu died, he couldn’t have cared much about her. If he had been carrying on with Kyrie while he was married to Asumu, he must not have cared about Asumu at all. Battler may also have felt that Rudolf must not have cared too much about _him_ , if he could apparently move on with Kyrie and Ange so easily, but if so, he never consciously acknowledges this in himself.

In response, Battler disowned his father. He moved in with his maternal grandparents, and even changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name, removing himself entirely from the Ushiromiya family. Battler stayed with his grandparents for the next six years, refusing to forgive his father even after his anger had cooled. His reasoning was that if Asumu wasn’t alive to hate Rudolf for betraying her, Battler would hate Rudolf in her place.

Only after both of his maternal grandparents are dead does Battler return to the Ushiromiya family, six years after his mother died. His anger towards his father has cooled, and unless he has other maternal relatives who would be willing to take him in, Battler’s only realistic option is to move back in with Rudolf. However, instead of just admitting this is his only real option (he does so in passing in EP1, but never really latches on to this), Battler once again invokes Asumu’s memory in justifying this decision.

Where before Battler claimed that Asumu would have wanted him to hate Rudolf in her place, he makes a mental 180° when it comes to going back to living with Rudolf. Now, he tells us that Asumu always thought it was silly when he and his father fought, and that Asumu would certainly want Battler and Rudolf to stop fighting, and make up. I will admit that this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, since this is essentially Battler invoking his mother’s memory however he sees fit to justify his own behavior, even if the ways he invokes Asumu’s memory blatantly contradict each other. But it does speak to just how important Asumu was—and is—to her son. That Battler does seem to carry lingering resentment towards Rudolf even after going back to living with him speaks to that importance as well.

What speaks most strongly to Asumu’s importance to Battler is how deeply his sense of self is tied to being her son. When, in EP4, he finds that he cannot say in red that “It was from Ushiromiya Asumu that [he] was born,” he self-destructs. When Battler discovers that he is not Asumu’s biological son, he literally erases himself from the game board, his sense of identity completely lost. It is only Ange’s reminder that Asumu’s love for him was real, even if the blood tie between them wasn’t, that brings Battler back to himself.

As for Asumu, we know from Rudolf that she probably realized at some point that Battler is not her biological child. She knew this, and yet she didn’t confront Rudolf, and didn’t expose the switch as she easily could have done. Instead, she continued to raise Battler as her son, “with all the affection she had,” and never acted in such a way as to even hint to him that something might be off.

Rudolf

Rudolf has over the course of his adult life pursued casual sexual relationships with many women, committing only to two of them, and showing no compunction about committing adultery even when married. His behavior towards the women he surrounded himself with as a young man is described as audacious, but not lacking in gentleness—and the latter is so far from being the way he would have watched Kinzo treat women that I have to wonder if it wasn’t done on purpose. However, that gentleness is belied by Rudolf’s manipulation of the women who surrounded him. Rudolf reveled in being the subject of these women’s attentions, reveled in pitting them against each other over him, like someone who craved being fawned over, craved being the sort of person other people cared enough about to fight over.

A dismissive attitude towards women, that which enabled Rudolf to commit serial infidelity and manipulate the women he surrounded himself with with no apparent regard for their well-being, that is likely something he picked up from Kinzo. However, Rudolf’s inability to take his relationships Asumu and Kyrie seriously enough to be faithful to them, his general inability to hold down stable relationships with women, and his apparent craving for positive attention, might be a result of the abuse he suffered at Kinzo’s (and possibly his mother’s) hands. Note also Rosa’s completely inability to hold down a stable relationship; while some of that is a consequence of institutionalized misogyny against single mothers, her own interpersonal problems seem to have played no small role.

Whatever the reason for Rudolf’s treatment of women, Asumu appears to have entered the scene rather late in the game. Kyrie was already well-established as Rudolf’s business partner and his ‘number one,’ and by Kyrie, Rudolf was starting to tire of ‘flashy girls.’ Asumu caught his attention with her vulnerability; the implication is that her fear of shaking vehicles triggered his protective instinct, and that this was how he first came to notice her.

Kyrie tells us that she think she managed to alienate Rudolf at this time, both by putting too much pressure on him business-wise, and because her ruthlessness disturbed him on a personal level. Asumu, meanwhile, was not ruthless, and neither did she put any pressure on Rudolf. Asumu often comforted Rudolf when he was feeling overwhelmed, either by soothing him verbally, or through physical gestures like putting a blanket over his shoulders or staying by his side until he was feeling calmer. To Rudolf, the appeal seems to have been that Asumu was someone who didn’t make him think about business when business was just too stressful, and instead saw to his emotional needs, rather than make more demands on him.

Asumu and Rudolf entered into a sexual relationship, and when Asumu became pregnant, they hastily married. Kyrie claims that Asumu purposely became pregnant in order to entrap Rudolf and force him to marry her. Given that Rudolf was already an inveterate womanizer by this point in time, I somehow doubt that this was the first time that he had ever gotten a woman pregnant (Though I suppose that could account for the women Kyrie ‘got rid of’). That Rudolf married Asumu when she became pregnant suggests that his feelings for her were different than for the other women. At the very least, Rudolf thought Asumu would be a good person to start a family with.

So Rudolf and Asumu are married, with a baby on the way. There’s a rather large wrinkle in this happy domestic scene in the form of Kyrie being pregnant too, but Rudolf thinks he can support two households if he has to (And now he is—albeit unknowingly—copying Kinzo instead of acting differently than him). All in all, things are looking up for Rudolf.

Up until Kyrie gives birth to a living baby, and Asumu a dead one.

We know what happened next. Rudolf bribed the hospital involved to switch Asumu’s stillborn child for Kyrie’s living one, and told the world that Battler was Asumu’s biological child, and not Kyrie’s. As to why he did this?

Rudolf is a weak man. He tends to take the path of least resistance, and avoid situations that would cause difficulties for him, or difficulties larger than what he’s already facing, anyways. See, for example, the EP7 Tea Party, where Rudolf, though unhappy about it, is not unwilling to kill Battler if he refuses to cooperate with him, in order to keep from antagonizing Kyrie. I would say that part of the reason he switched Asumu’s stillborn baby for Kyrie’s living one is because it kills two birds with one stone: gets rid of the problem of having to maintain two separate households, and the interpersonal problems that come with his wife having a stillborn child, and his mistress a living one. Moreover, if it’s his wife with the baby and his mistress with the stillborn child, then nothing has to change for Rudolf, and he can just carry on as he did before.

However, I do not think that this is the only reason for the switch. Look at the examples Rudolf has of how women in Asumu’s position are treated. The Ushiromiya family does not have a history of treating the women who marry into it well, especially women who fail to give birth. The prevailing attitude is that the women who marry into the family are ‘borrowed wombs’ whose entire value rests on their ability to reproduce. At this point, Rudolf has had over a decade to watch how horribly Natsuhi has been treated for being unable to conceive (And the manga adaptation of EP8 goes ahead and makes explicit that Rudolf was thinking of Natsuhi when he was trying to figure out what to do about this). If Kinzo finds out, there’s a chance he’ll put pressure on Rudolf to discard Asumu and marry Kyrie instead. Even if Kinzo doesn’t do that, or Rudolf resists, Asumu’s position in the Ushiromiya family will likely become extremely unpleasant for her if it becomes widely-known that she failed to bear a living child. Considering the history of abuse in the Ushiromiya family, ‘extremely unpleasant’ would likely be perfectly hellish for someone who comes from what appears to have been a healthy, loving family. Rudolf may have wanted to spare her that, and once again, the manga adaptation of EP8 does lean in that direction.

Another explanation is that Rudolf genuinely wanted to stay married to Asumu, even if it’s possible that he wouldn’t have married her in the first place if she hadn’t gotten pregnant. It can be inferred that Rudolf genuinely loved Asumu more than he did Kyrie, or at the very least, preferred being married to Asumu over being married to Kyrie.

So, Rudolf has switched the babies, and he suspects that Asumu figured out about it at some point, but he can’t say for sure, because she never confronted him over it. While one doubts that Asumu was entirely happy when she found out about this, that she went along with it likely speaks to her trust in her husband, as well as her love for her son. Rudolf and Asumu took Battler home from the hospital, and they began to live as a family.

In spite of all of this, we get evidence that the honeymoon period was definitely over for Rudolf and Asumu after a few years.

At some point, Asumu’s fear of shaking vehicles was no longer something that engaged Rudolf’s sympathy, but irritated him instead. Why, we don’t know exactly, but it is possible that it’s because it was inconvenient for Rudolf, because it put a cramp in his lifestyle. Rudolf mentions in EP4 that whenever they tried to go somewhere far away, Asumu would get very ‘annoying’ with her fears about a ship sinking or a plane crashing, screaming ‘fall, fall’ the same way Battler does.

Meanwhile, in EP1, we get a flashback of Rudolf making a quip to a young Battler that angry wives are far more frightening than demons and monsters. To me, this indicates that Rudolf may have fallen afoul of Asumu’s temper often enough for him to remark about her anger being ‘scary’, even if he only means it as a joke.

As to what Asumu might have been angry with Rudolf about, we get some hints about that as well. In EP8, Rudolf tells Kyrie that Asumu wasn’t nearly “as generous and accepting as she looked.” To me, it seems entirely likely that Rudolf is talking about Asumu’s attitude towards his continued infidelity, that Asumu wasn’t really what anyone would call accepting of it. This is reinforced by information we get in EP6, in which we are told that Asumu even got worried when Battler started showing signs of a cavalier attitude towards girls, mixed in with his popularity with the girls at his school. She apparently thought it was down to ‘Rudolf’s blood,’ and was _not_ interested in watching Battler act any more like his father as regards to girls than he already was.

It’s even possible that Battler may have picked up on tensions in his parents’ marriage. While his “You always want to make me vomit!” and his “Are you glad that Mom is finally dead now?” in EP7 might just be Battler mentally ‘rewriting history’ as regards to his relationship with his father, and Rudolf’s with Asumu, it’s not impossible that if there was tension in the marriage, Battler noticed. Children can be very perceptive about this kind of thing.

Do I think they were heading for divorce? No. Whether it was because they didn’t want to divorce while Battler was still a child, because neither of them could find the will to break the relationship off, or because they did love each other enough to want to try to make the relationship work even with these difficulties, I don’t think Rudolf and Asumu were planning on separating. The marriage was in no real danger of dissolving. But neither do I think that, within a few years, the relationship was any longer what either of them had thought it would be.

Rudolf had been expecting that Asumu would be significantly more accepting of his infidelity than she actually was—or was at least expecting that she would be willing to overlook it. He expected that she wouldn’t make things inconvenient for him, either as regards to his sexual affairs, or in other matters, and when she expected fidelity from him, and when her intense phobia of shaking vehicles refused to go away just because it was now inconvenient to him, he resented that.

Asumu, for her part, must have gone into the marriage knowing that Rudolf liked to sleep around, that he tended to string along a lot of women at once. But it seems that she was expecting that, once they were married, he would be faithful to her, and break off any relationships he had with other women. Rudolf did not do this, and Asumu was apparently extremely unhappy when he instead carried on like normal. As for Asumu’s phobia, Rudolf might have found it annoying and inconvenient for him, but it was rather more than a simple inconvenience for her. If Asumu couldn’t handle anything more than riding on a bicycle or in a car, that means that she couldn’t handle flying or riding in a boat, and possibly couldn’t even handle riding in a bus or a train (and Kyrie does mention in EP6 that Asumu had an adverse reaction to buses), which in a country like Japan would have seriously impaired her ability to live a normal life, given that riding on a bus or a train is the average citizen’s primary way of getting to places not within walking distance. That Rudolf eventually came to find this annoying, and stopped showing her any real sympathy after a while (beyond the sort of token expression of sympathy we get in a flashback in EP7) must have been a slap in the face. Between Rudolf’s continued infidelity, his lack of sympathy for Asumu’s phobia, and his foisting a child that wasn’t hers on to her without even telling her that that was what he was doing, not even telling her that her biological child was _dead_ , Asumu had good reason to be very upset with Rudolf, and to resent him as well. Whether she actually did resent Rudolf is unknown.

Regardless of all this, Rudolf appears to have been genuinely devastated and guilt-stricken when Asumu died. We see him castigate himself, even going so far as to ask Krauss “Did I kill Asumu?” I would say that this is, on some level, further manifestation of Rudolf being a weak man, as I said earlier. It’s a lot easier for him to feel guilty about hurting Asumu when Asumu is dead, and isn’t alive to hold him to ‘troublesome’ expectations or to irritate him by not letting him do whatever he wanted, or by being an inconvenience to him. It’s a lot easier for him to feel guilty about hurting Asumu when he doesn’t have to _do_ anything about it. But I do think this guilt, and this grief, is genuine. If Rudolf found himself appreciating Asumu a lot more once she was gone than he had when she was still alive, he is hardly unique in that regard. In retrospect, if EP8 is to be believed, he even admits to regretting saddling Asumu with a child that wasn’t hers, only recognizing after she was gone that it might have hurt her pretty badly, and appreciating the fact that she raised Battler “with all the affection she had” anyways.

And Rudolf does seem somewhat protective of Asumu’s memory after her death. In EP4, when Kyrie tries to go off on an Asumu-related rant related to her fear of shaking vehicles in Rudolf’s presence, Rudolf shuts her down pretty quickly. Granted, he does so by conceding that he found that fear annoying, but he doesn’t seem at all eager to let Kyrie criticize or insult Asumu in front of him. To me, this is more evidence that Rudolf might have come to a greater appreciation of Asumu after she died.

Natsuhi

There is relatively little information on how Natsuhi felt about Asumu. It comes from EP7, and it is difficult to determine whether this information pertains to how Natsuhi felt about Asumu in particular, or if it was a more general reaction to the situation of Rudolf marrying an already-pregnant Kyrie not long after Asumu’s death, and Battler disowning his father as a result. When the news reaches her, Natsuhi is irate with Rudolf, expressing sympathy for Battler’s decision and also expressing the opinion that Rudolf conducted himself disgracefully. She says that if Battler was on Rokkenjima at that time, she would “hold him and cry along with him.”

It is possible that Natsuhi is simply expressing her already-established intolerance for adultery and suggestions thereof. In the past, when it was suggested that Beatrice was Kinzo’s mistress, she would immediately, angrily shoot down the idea (unless the situation was truly dire), and would express sympathy for her late mother-in-law’s anguish over the idea that her husband was cheating on her. But it is also possible that Natsuhi and Asumu had such a relationship that would cause Natsuhi to grieve for Asumu’s death, and become furious on her behalf when it is revealed that Rudolf was cheating on her.

Ange

As Asumu died before Ange was born, there is obviously not a whole lot to say about any hypothetical relationship between the two women. However, certain things Ange says in EP4 and EP6 are interesting as regards to her possible feelings about Asumu.

In EP4, when Ange is trying to make Battler find the will to fight again, she points out to him that even if Asumu isn’t his biological mother, that doesn’t change the fact that she loved and cared for him, that she was a mother _to_ him. Ange knows full well who Battler’s biological mother actually is, and could easily have blown the whistle and told him the truth, giving him even more of an impetus to win against Beatrice so he can leave and return home to his little sister, who is his full sister after all. But instead she chooses to remind Battler of how much Asumu loved him, and of how much he loved her, and tell him that a lack of blood ties doesn’t matter. It might be simply indicative of Ange’s willingness to acknowledge that bonds of blood aren’t the only important relationships in the world, but it might also speak to some sort of respect for Asumu, if only through what she knows about the woman from Battler’s talks with Ange about her.

And in EP6, we do get some insight into what Ange thinks of the situation involving her parents and Asumu. Interestingly, Ange seems to put the blame on Rudolf for the whole mess. Asumu would have been an easy scapegoat to assign blame to. Asumu isn’t Ange’s mother, Ange never knew her, and Kyrie suffered a tremendous amount of pain and suffering (that Ange has special insight into, from reading Kyrie’s journal) because of Asumu and Rudolf’s relationship. But Ange doesn’t scapegoat her, and her attitude towards Asumu seems to be almost completely neutral, with only a modicum of ambivalence seeping in.


	4. Part 3: Physical Appearance

Physical Appearance

Asumu shares with Kinzo’s unnamed wife the dubious distinction of being the only two members of the Ushiromiya family without a character sprite. We are given no description of her physical characteristics in the VN, and since Battler is not her biological child, we cannot guess what she might have looked like from looking at him.

The only hint we get of Asumu’s appearance in the VN comes from EP6, when Kyrie says that Asumu caught Rudolf’s eye after he had ‘tired of flashy girls.’ This suggests that, however nebulous ‘flashy’ and ‘not flashy’ might be as descriptors, Asumu fit into the latter category.

The manga does eventually give us a character design for Asumu, and given that this design is consistent across several different Eps, and several different mangaka, I think we can take this as being as close to an official design for Asumu as we’re ever going to get. Across a span of over a decade, from before she married Rudolf up to her death, Asumu’s mode of dress definitely wouldn’t be called flashy. She dresses very femininely and very modestly, in dresses, blouses and long skirts. She is depicted with wavy, shoulder-length hair with a short fringe; given that her hair has no shading, it can be assumed to be either blonde or a very light shade of brown. Asumu appears to have been of much the same body type as Kyrie, tall and slender with large breasts (Which suggests that Battler inherited at least part of his taste in women from his father). The EP8 manga depicts Asumu with large eyes and soft facial features.

Whenever her mouth is drawn, Asumu is typically depicted smiling. The only times she is not is in EP7, when Rudolf is wallowing in guilt just after her death, and in EP6, when Kyrie is shown trying to rattle her with the news of her pregnancy.

 

 

Asumu as a young woman, before marrying Rudolf. (Both images are taken from the EP6 manga.)

 

 

Asumu around the time she married Rudolf and Battler was born. (All images were taken from the EP8 manga.)

 

 

Asumu when Battler was a young child. (Image is taken from the EP8 manga.)

 

 

Asumu around the time of her death. (Top left image is from EP4; other two are from EP7.)


	5. Part 4: Death

**Death**

Asumu’s untimely death sparked a great deal of turmoil within the Ushiromiya family. Her passing precipitated Rudolf’s hasty second marriage, and Battler’s leaving the Ushiromiya family in protest. This, in turn, contributed to Sayo’s deteriorating emotional well-being as the years wore on. The effects of Asumu’s death are still felt six years later.

Oddly, for such a significant death, we have no information as to _how_ Asumu died. We are given the answer to this question nowhere in the VNs, not even in Battler’s character profile, or in EP1, when we are first being introduced to our cast. Umineko is mum on Asumu’s cause of death. The most information we get is Battler and Krauss both commenting on the timing of Asumu’s death in conjunction with Kyrie’s pregnancy, and Rudolf’s intense guilt following her death leading him to wonder if he had been indirectly responsible for Asumu dying.

Below, I speculate on a few possible causes of death.

Accident or Illness

It seems to me that one of these two options is the most plausible explanation for Asumu’s death. An accidental death would explain why Asumu’s dying seems to have come out of the blue, seems to be something that hit her family with no apparent forewarning.

Death by illness is a little trickier, and there are two ways I think it could go. One, is that the onset of illness was sudden, and that she died suddenly. Two, is that Asumu’s illness was _not_ a sudden thing, but that she managed to hide it from Battler until the end, or close to the end—I feel that if Asumu was ill for a long time before dying, and Battler knew that, he would likely have brought it up at some point in the series. A slow death by illness might explain Rudolf’s feelings of being indirectly responsible for Asumu’s death, if he believes that her unhappiness over his infidelity exacerbated her deteriorating health.

Suicide

I do not believe this cause of death to be likely, but my reasoning as to _why_ it is unlikely bears elaborating upon.

If Asumu had killed herself, it would have been brought up at some point in the series. Kyrie would have crowed about it during her Asumu-related monologues in EP3 and EP6. Rudolf would have brought it up during his guilt-stricken conversation with Krauss in EP7. There would be no wondering if he was indirectly responsible for Asumu’s death; Rudolf would likely be directly blaming himself for Asumu’s suicide, if she had committed suicide. Battler _definitely_ would have told us about it. If Asumu had committed suicide, I believe that there would exist a significantly greater amount of hostility between Battler and Rudolf in the series. It’s possible that Battler wouldn’t have returned to the Ushiromiya family even after his maternal grandparents’ deaths.

The main reasons there are any room for this theory is because of the timing of Asumu’s death, how little we know about her death, and because we know so little about her personal history. We don’t know her mental health history*, don’t know if she had a history of suicide attempts or ideation. We do not know if Asumu had a physical or mental health disorder that might have made her more likely to commit suicide. If Asumu did commit suicide, the only readily available possible reason as to why is that it was in reaction to learning of Kyrie’s pregnancy, but we just don’t know.

Murder

This one is… interesting.

If Asumu _was_ murdered, certainly neither her husband nor her son knows anything about it. I do not believe Battler capable of it, and I do not believe that Rudolf was hinting any possible involvement of his in Asumu’s death when he expressed guilt over it. Neither do I believe that the police considered anything about her death suspicious; if they did, we would have heard about it.

However, if Asumu was murdered, there is only one suspect with a clear motive: Kyrie. Kyrie’s attitude towards Asumu is frankly murderous, even years after the latter’s death. During Asumu’s lifetime, Kyrie reports having prayed and wished for her death, having fought to work up the nerve to kill Asumu over the course of many years. In EP3, Kyrie expresses the belief that her hatred had become a curse, which killed Asumu. She also expresses the sentiment that Rudolf had been stolen from her ‘for eighteen years,’ indicating that she feels as though at war with Asumu’s shade, six years after her death.

Kyrie is no stranger to violence. Given her sister Kasumi’s apparent familiarity with tools of torture and the ease with which she orders her henchmen to beat Ange, and the assertion made in EP4 that the Sumadera family would normally have killed Kyrie for choosing Rudolf over the husband chosen for her, she was likely raised to consider violence an appropriate response when someone crosses her. Furthermore, Ange reveals to us in EP6 that Kyrie would sometimes ‘get rid of’ the girls who hung around Rudolf. While no one is ever explicit about what ‘get rid of’ _means_ exactly, Kyrie’s comment in the EP7 Tea Party about how she is ‘used to’ smashing women’s faces in suggests that she did so through violence. So Kyrie is not someone who would necessarily object to inflicting physical harm on someone else, if that someone was in her way.

There’s also the ‘convenient’ timing of Asumu’s death to take into account. Kyrie was pregnant with Ange when Asumu died. It’s noted that, twelve years prior, when Kyrie was pregnant with Battler, she tried to break up Rudolf and Asumu on multiple occasions, to no avail. Given her failure to get Rudolf away from Asumu the last time she was pregnant, and once again facing the prospect of having to raise her lover’s child on her own, Kyrie felt compelled to take ‘drastic measures’ to get Asumu out of the picture. It is noted that it was around the time of Asumu’s death that Kyrie had finally built up enough of a will to commit murder to buy a murder weapon (The knife mentioned in EP6).

The biggest wrench in this scenario is that Kyrie says that she did not kill Asumu, that her hands were clean. I am not sure how much we should take this at face value, for two reasons.

One, is that Kyrie was speaking to Jessica at the time, as a character on the game board. While we the readers know better, Kyrie was under the impression that she would be leaving Rokkenjima once the typhoon passed. If she admitted to her niece that she had committed murder, then as far as Kyrie knew, there was nothing stopping Jessica from going to the police once she was able.

Two, is that Kyrie expresses the belief that her hatred became a curse that killed Asumu. Well, that means magic (Kyrie even calls it magic in EP3), and though Kyrie might not be working off of the same template, her daughter communicates important information to us in EP4 about how to kill with magic. When Ange calls upon the Seven Stakes of Purgatory to kill her bullying classmates, she finds that they cannot, because she herself lacks the will to do so. Ange learns that the only way she can use the Stakes to kill is if she kills someone herself (or has another human kill for her), and then lies and says the Stakes did it. The only way you can kill someone with magic is to kill them yourself, and then lie and say it was done with magic. Lie to others, and to make it more convincing, lie to yourself.

* The only hint we get is from Asumu’s apparently severe phobia of riding in shaking vehicles. If this is indeed a phobia, that is itself an anxiety disorder, though one that only manifests through exposure to a specific trigger. But we know so little about Asumu’s fear, and how it developed, that I don’t know what effect it could or could not have here.


	6. Part 5: Asumu the Woman

**Asumu the Woman**

The big problem with coming to any conclusions about what Asumu was like as a person is that we never get any direct insight into her feelings and thought processes. Everything we know about Asumu, we learn from other people, and these people cannot be fully trusted to give an unbiased account of her.

Kyrie hated Asumu enough to want to kill her, and she has been known to misrepresent the situation between herself, Rudolf and Asumu, to the effect of making herself look better and Asumu worse. Battler sits at the opposite end of the spectrum; he puts his mother on a pedestal. He was a child when she died, and cannot possibly be expected to possess an adult’s understanding of Asumu as a person. He makes it sound as though his relationship with his mother was perfectly blissful, when we know that, logically, it can’t have been all the time—and we know that Asumu was unhappy about Battler’s emerging cavalier attitude towards girls, so there is a specific point of tension that might have existed in their relationship, and is yet never mentioned by Battler. Even Rudolf, who comes the closest of the three to giving us a ‘neutral’ account of Asumu, lets his biases seep in. He tells us that Asumu wasn’t “as generous and accepting as she looked,” and you might think this tells us that she could be, say, judgmental and close-minded, until you realize that the thing she wasn’t “generous and accepting” about was almost certainly her husband’s infidelity.

We never see Asumu except through a filter. A clogged filter, at that.  So is it possible to make any statements about Asumu when you strip away Kyrie’s character assassination, Battler’s rose-tinted lens, and Rudolf’s typically jaundiced accounts? Is it even possible to come to any conclusions about Asumu as a person? Despite everything, I’d say yes.

First, I wanted to address three topics that we can theorize about, points that can potentially become large sources of debate when trying to understand Asumu as a person.

Asumu’s Phobia

It is difficult to pin down exactly what Asumu’s alleged fear of riding in shaking vehicles is. Amaxophobia is the fear of riding in a car, but Asumu was reportedly alright with riding in a car, so long as it wasn’t shaking; something like a plane, a boat, or a bus or a train, she could not tolerate if there was even the slightest hint of turbulence. Aviophobia is the fear of flying, but that is too specific to fit Asumu’s phobia by itself. Her problem could be dystychiphobia, the fear of being in an accident, but that, by contrast, feels too non-specific—and once again, if this was the problem, it would likely manifest when she rode in a car, as well.

If you take Kyrie’s claim that Asumu’s phobia was purely an act she put on to win Rudolf’s attention and sympathy as truth, everything else we know about Asumu becomes painted in a very different light. Indeed, the Asumu who fakes this fear is a very different person from the Asumu who does not. One is a talented actress and manipulator who cold-bloodedly exploited the protective instinct of a man she wanted for her own, and the Asumu who does not fake this fear… is not. The Asumu who fakes this fear comes across as a ruthless, rather heartless person. But I don’t think the Asumu who fakes a fear of shaking vehicles really exists anywhere but in Kyrie’s hopeless dreams. It doesn’t gel with my reading of her, and does not gel with the evidence that Asumu was actually a rather straightforward person (More on _that_ later).

I do not think Asumu faked her phobia of riding in shaking vehicles, for any reason. That is something that would be way too troublesome to convincingly, consistently fake over the course of more than a decade. Even the most talented of actresses would strain. There’s also the fact that Rudolf eventually came to find this fear of Asumu’s annoying. If Asumu had observed that Rudolf had a strong protective instinct, and her fear was a show shrewdly calculated to wind Rudolf’s attention and sympathy, then surely she would notice when it began to annoy Rudolf instead of making him feel sympathetic to her. In that case, you would think Asumu would have some sort of ‘miraculous breakthrough,’ but no. Her fear remained, even when it wasn’t convenient for herself or others.

Let’s talk about the phobia, though, and its impact on Asumu’s life.

I mentioned in Part 2 that, if Asumu really couldn’t handle any vehicle besides a bicycle or a car, then her phobia of riding in shaking vehicles significantly impacted her life. It would have severely impaired her ability to get anywhere not within walking distance, since riding by bus or train is the average Japanese citizen’s primary means of transportation. How did she get to school if school was far away? How did she get to work, presuming she did work before marrying Rudolf? Did she own a car? Did her parents drive her to school, and possibly later to work (Assuming _they_ owned a car)? Did she have a bike that she rode around town? Did she choose to walk to get to places even if they were miles away or the weather was bad, simply because she was just _that_ opposed to riding on a bus or a train? Did she try to suck it up and ride on public transportation if the need was urgent enough? It should be noted that Japanese schools place a strong emphasis on students not doing anything that could damage the school’s reputation while out in public—and screaming “Fall, fall!” on a bus probably counts as “damaging to the school’s reputation.” Asumu was someone who likely had to plan her routes of travel well in advance of actually going anywhere.

For that matter, where did this phobia come from in the first place? Is it the result of some trauma, like being in a bad wreck when she was young? Is it a symptom of motion sickness (Though in that case, you’d think riding in a car would trigger it too)? Did it just crop up randomly? Did Asumu ‘inherit’ the phobia from someone the way Battler ‘inherited’ it from her? I suppose this particular detail is something for fanfic writers to sort out.

There’s also Asumu’s attitude towards travel. This is interesting to think about, in light of her phobia. Did Asumu like to travel? Was she a homebody, content to live in the same town all her life and never go anywhere else, or was she a thwarted traveler, someone who would have liked to see the world, but was hemmed in by her fear of shaking vehicles? The fact that Rudolf tells us how annoying her phobia was whenever they tried to go somewhere far away tells us that Asumu _did_ travel with Rudolf. Whether she did it solely to please him, because she genuinely wanted to travel, or for some other reason, we do know that Asumu was willing to travel, even if she did like her means of transportation. One imagines Asumu curled up on a hotel bed, too strung-out and exhausted to move, while Rudolf goes out to enjoy the sights for a few hours (Battler having presumably been left with a babysitter).

Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner

In Part 2, I touched upon the fact that Kyrie was invited over to Rudolf and Asumu’s house on multiple occasions while the latter was still alive. The fact that Battler was able to form (what he thought was) a good relationship with Kyrie speaks to the fact that he was never given the impression that Kyrie was someone his mother disliked. While we do get the strong impression that Asumu put up a good front and never let slip any feelings of animosity towards Kyrie while Battler was present, what we don’t know is _why_.

It could be that Asumu _was_ unhappy with the idea of hosting Kyrie. In that case, either she didn’t complain to Rudolf about it, or she did, but was overruled. Rudolf is the sort of person to put what’s convenient to him over what is or isn’t hurtful to the people he cares about, after all. If this is the case, Asumu simply decided that there was no point in making a scene (And implicit in all of the suppositions is that Kyrie thought there was no point in making a scene, either).

If Asumu figured out about the switch, she may have had a good idea of just who Battler’s biological mother actually was. It may be that, regardless of her personal feelings for Kyrie, Asumu wanted Battler to have some time to be with his birth mother, even if Battler and Kyrie couldn’t know about their exact relationship to one another. I can’t imagine that Asumu ever picked up on the animosity Kyrie felt towards Battler, after all. If Kyrie managed to hide it well enough that the most Rudolf ever picked up of it was that she couldn’t accept Battler, not that she hated him, I doubt that Asumu, who wasn’t nearly as close to Kyrie, would have been able to tell. She probably wouldn’t have been nearly as willing to let Battler spend time with Kyrie if she could pick up on that hatred.

It’s possible that Asumu didn’t view Kyrie as a threat. Kyrie might have been Rudolf’s mistress, but Asumu was _married_ to the man, and if Asumu knew not only about the switch, but who Battler’s birth mother actually was, she might have taken that as reassurance that Rudolf wanted Asumu as his wife more than he did Kyrie.

Alternately, it could be that Asumu simply didn’t think that way, in terms of viewing other women as threats to her relationship with Rudolf. What little we know about Asumu’s background suggests that she didn’t come from the same kind of cutthroat, high-stakes world as Rudolf and Kyrie. She wasn’t primed to think that when she was in a relationship with a man, she needed to treat all other women around him as obstacles to be removed. She also may not have been primed to treat other women as the reason for her relationship difficulties, if she was to have them.

Further evidence that Asumu didn’t think of other women, namely Kyrie, as being threats to her relationship with Rudolf comes from Battler’s reaction to learning of Kyrie’s pregnancy and Rudolf’s infidelity. He blames Rudolf, but not Kyrie; he blames his adulterous father, but not the woman he cheated on Asumu with. I know it’s not impossible that Battler could have made this judgment independent of any outside influence, but most kids Battler’s age are still operating primarily off of the values their _parents_ (or other guardians) inculcated them with. Battler reflects a willingness to note blame any ‘other woman’ for Asumu’s marital problems with Rudolf, a willingness not to indulge in some narrative of Kyrie as the Evil Homewrecker just so he can try to salvage some measure of good feeling for his father. If he picked this attitude up from anyone, why not from the woman who, while she showed little patience for Kyrie’s “Operation: Break-Up” antics, was willing to host Kyrie in her house, without letting any animosity slip to Battler?

The Switch

Probably the biggest bombshell we get about Asumu as a person comes from EP8, when Rudolf relays the information that Asumu likely knew that he’d switched her dead baby for Kyrie’s living one, and yet never said anything. The fact that this is all the information we get regarding Asumu and the switch leaves a great deal open to speculation, but hey, what is meta for?

Some thought should be devoted to how Asumu responded when she first realized that she had actually lost her baby that day, especially in light of the fact that she appears to have never conceived again after her stillbirth. Some women are alright with the idea of only having one child. Others are not, especially not if her only living child dies—or was never alive to start with. Asumu would not have been able to mourn her dead child openly, as that would have risked blowing the whole thing wide open, and Asumu seems to have decided that that wasn’t in her best interests. That Rudolf never reports Asumu suddenly becoming randomly distraught and staying that way for a long while afterwards is a testament either to how good she was at hiding her feelings concerning the switch, or to just how out of touch Rudolf was with her on an emotional level.

What implications does Asumu’s not revealing that she knew about the switch have for her relationship with Battler? There are two different ways to look at this: unsympathetically, and sympathetically. Looking at this in an unsympathetic light shows us a woman who kept another woman from her rightful child, even going so far as to let that woman think her child was dead (I am reminded of a piece of pre-EP8 speculation I read once, that posited that Asumu had switched the babies by herself, ignoring the possibility of involvement by Rudolf, and ignoring the fact that Asumu probably would have been too weak just after childbirth to pull off something like this). Shine a sympathetic light on this situation, and Asumu is just trying to make the best of a bad situation. We have the version with love, the version without love, and hanging somewhere in the cracks between, the truth.

We don’t know how long it was before Asumu started having her suspicions. It could have been when Battler was still a baby, or it could have been when he was a bit older. If the latter, I suppose it’s possible that Asumu noticed that her child bore no resemblance to her, but maybe she saw the traces of another woman in his features… Rudolf should really count himself lucky Battler didn’t inherit Kyrie’s hair color. As per the EP6 manga, Asumu knew that Kyrie was pregnant (supposing she didn’t think that Kyrie had lied to her), and if Kyrie tried some of her “Operation: Break-Up” antics after she had begun to show, Asumu might have known in the VNs as well. She has a strong suspicion that Battler isn’t hers, and maybe a strong suspicion of who his biological mother actually is, since it would be relatively less of a risk for Rudolf to pick his own child than try to pass off a random baby as Asumu’s. Asumu has a lot to think of, in this case. Her baby is actually dead, and her husband, without her knowledge or consent (or Kyrie’s for that matter, something that Asumu might indeed care about, even if only on principle) took Kyrie’s baby from her, passed that baby to Asumu to raise, and told the world that it was really Kyrie who had a stillbirth.

Rudolf tells us that Asumu raised Battler with “all the affection she had.” It does seem that Asumu genuinely loved Battler, and had probably come to love him before she started having suspicions as to his exact relation to her. Her decision to keep silent might have been something as simple as a selfish desire to keep Battler as her son, even if it meant making Kyrie go on thinking that she had had a stillbirth and that her child was dead. After all, if this became widely-known, Rudolf could easily land in hot water legally, maybe even go to prison, and in that case, custody of Battler might well be awarded to Kyrie instead, if Kinzo or maybe Krauss didn’t pull strings to get Battler sent to them instead. Even if the Ushiromiya wealth and influence kept Rudolf out of trouble with the law, Asumu could still lose contact with Battler, if Kyrie (or Kinzo) used the truth to push for Rudolf to divorce Asumu and marry Kyrie instead, and was successful. Alternately, it could be that Asumu took this as an opportunity to get one back at Kyrie, even if she couldn’t let on to Kyrie that that was what she was doing, and with or without considering the ramifications of the switch being revealed, as per the first option.

Asumu’s decision to keep quiet could have been born of more selfless motives, such as a desire to avoid causing Battler the pain of thinking she didn’t want him, or to avoid triggering any sort of crisis of identity in him. When one loves one’s child, one tends to want that child to feel wanted. When one loves one’s child, one tends not to want that child to have an identity crisis because of their actions. It could be this, what was illustrated above, a little of both or none of the above. Whatever Asumu’s reasons for keeping her silence, she was a loving mother to Battler. Battler could not be held at fault for his father’s actions, and once he was capable of understanding what was going on around him, the emotional upheaval for Battler involved in revealing the switch would have done him enormous, perhaps lasting harm. Asumu didn’t make Battler suffer for being the child meant to replace hers.

As for what Asumu thought of Rudolf personally for making this decision? Well, I can’t possibly imagine that she was terribly _pleased_ that he had done this without her knowledge or consent. I can’t imagine that Asumu was pleased that her husband had violated her agency, manipulated her life for his own convenience. The fact that she never confronted Rudolf over this speaks either to her not being angry enough to want to confront him, or to the fact that she was able to keep her temper under wraps in this case. Her attitude towards Rudolf might have been pure displeasure that Rudolf had deceived her in this way, or there might have been some gratitude (possibly grudging) mixed in.

Though Natsuhi was herself probably already pregnant by the time Asumu met her husband’s family, she probably still would have been able to pick up on the mistreatment Natsuhi had suffered for being unable to conceive for so many years. Asumu could likely guess just how intolerable her position would have become if it was known that she had failed to bear a living child. Asumu might have chosen to believe that Rudolf had made the switch for her sake, to make things easier for her and to protect her from censure. She might have chosen to take this as proof that Rudolf would rather be married to her than to Kyrie. She might have been grateful. However, as I pointed out in Part 2, this could easily have become a point of tension for her as well. Asumu could easily have come to resent the fact that Rudolf had taken from her the right to mourn her dead baby openly, taken from her the right to _choose_ if she wanted to raise Battler or not.

Personality

I would be lying if I said that the details we get about Asumu in the VNs allow us to compose a fleshed-out psychological profile of her. There just isn’t enough. But there is enough for us to make some assertions about her personality.

I think that Asumu genuinely had a nurturing personality. She is described as having given plenty of care and attention to Battler, and as never making him feel lonely or neglected. Even if you want to dismiss that as the sort of thing a mother ought to do automatically, there’s also her behavior when she and Rudolf first got together. Putting a blanket over someone’s shoulders when they’re stressed and staying by their side until they feel better is nurturing behavior. That Asumu is described as doing this consistently, combined with her care of Battler, does indicate a nurturing streak in her personality.

Up to a certain point, Asumu does appear to have been a forgiving person. In the manga adaptation of EP8, Rudolf lays out as part of the reason he doesn’t want to lose Asumu is that she “forgives [his] mistakes and accepts [him], even when [he’s] such a pathetic person.” Asumu is presented to us as the kind of person who would forgive her loved ones their faults, but only to a certain extent, which leads me to my next point…

Asumu could be quite firm when she wanted to be, and could not be budged when sufficiently determined. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is sometimes overlooked when Umineko readers think about Asumu. After all, a surface reading of Asumu, if you dismiss every last thing Kyrie says about her as untrustworthy, presents Asumu as “delicate flower who breaks down on public transportation and suffers through her husband’s affairs without ever successfully getting him to stop.”  But closer examination shows Asumu as being capable of being quite firm and determined, even to the point of stubbornness.

I mentioned that Rudolf’s line about Asumu not being as “generous and accepting as she looked” probably has to do with her reaction to his infidelity. Well, what does that mean, exactly? It means that even if Asumu wasn’t able to get Rudolf to be faithful to her, she wasn’t going to pretend to be happy about it just to make things more convenient for him. Asumu expected Rudolf to be faithful to her once they were married, she wasn’t going to budge from that position, and Rudolf _would_ know how unhappy she was with him over it, even if it caused further tension in their marriage.

There’s also Asumu’s reaction to Kyrie’s attempts to break up her and Rudolf. She summarily shut down these attempts, refused to give Kyrie so much as a hearing, and showed no sign of being even slightly shaken by Kyrie’s attempts to separate her from her husband. She was determined to stay with Rudolf. She was married to the man, and she wasn’t just going to bow out and slink off the stage just because Kyrie was pregnant or because Kyrie had known Rudolf longer and thought she had a better claim to Rudolf for whatever reason. And honestly, staying married to Rudolf after everything he put Asumu through is an exercise in determination by itself.

Conclusion

Asumu is one of only three female characters in Umineko that I would say Ryukishi rather glossed over when he ought to have devoted more attention to her, the other two being Ushiromiya Beatrice and Kinzo’s frustratingly unnamed wife. What information we are given lets us come to the same conclusion about Asumu as we come to with the other mothers: she wasn’t a martyr, wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t a two-dimensional monster, either. Even when we have to read between the lines to find kernels of the ‘real’ Asumu, Ryukishi still wrote her as a human being, not as a stereotype or an archetype or a ham-fisted collection of tropes. That is manifestly his strength as a character writer, and it’s what allows us to really know anything about such an elusive character in the first place.


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